It has never been greater to be a straight chiropractor than at this point in history. While it is true that the straight chiropractic educational community has suffered some severe setbacks in the past few years, straight chiropractic is doing just fine. There appears to me to be more interest in straight chiropractic than ever before. For example, the number of chiropractic college students receiving The Pivot Review has almost reached the 1,000 mark. We are getting requests from almost every chiropractic college bookstore to stock Chiropractic Philosophy and objective straight chiropractic has even been analyzed in the “prestigious” JMPT. When the publisher of the most mixer-oriented, professional tabloid writes an article on The Death of Common Sense in Health Care, we must be influencing people. More important than all of that, is the fact that every day more and more chiropractors are starting to see the value of our approach to the practice of chiropractic. A few years ago when the straight chiropractic community said, “Managed Care, Who needs it, who wants it!”, the rest of the profession looked at us like we were crazy. When the world is falling apart and some individual is standing around smiling like he doesn’t have a care in the world, you conclude that either he is nuts or he knows something you don’t know. Well it seems the profession is now starting to conclude that we are not the crazy ones and that we have some knowledge which gives us a confidence in these perilous times, a knowledge that they do not have. Many of them are beginning to want that knowledge and confidence. We are not running around trying to pursue managed health-care programs. We are not expending great sums of money trying to influence legislators. We are not devastated by the attacks on chiropractic in the media, seeing it as a gigantic conspiracy to keep us out of health care reform. Frankly, we don’t care if it is or it isn’t.
I believe the recent events with the straight chiropractic colleges and the accreditation problem has been a real blessing to straight chiropractic in some ways. We had been led to believe that the future of straight chiropractic would live or die with the colleges and a separate, straight accreditation process. Well, we lost the colleges, and as far as I can see, straight chiropractic didn’t lose a beat. We haven’t even had to have an emergency summit meeting in Chicago to plan our future strategy. We just keep doing what we are doing with the knowledge that the only thing that can crumble is the approach to chiropractic that has no strong philosophical foundation. No one is coming after our licenses. No one is bothering us. The profession has too many problems of its own to worry about us. So we are free to practice and promote straight chiropractic. I believe that is what we can best do for ourselves, the straight chiropractic movement and the entire profession. What we need are thousands of successful straight chiropractors who are adjusting, educating and influencing multitudes of people. We need chiropractors who are successful, who will be a testimony to the disenchanted practitioners as well as for the graduating chiropractic students who are hungry for some meaning and direction for their practices and some assurance that they will be able to make a decent living. There are thousands of chiropractic college graduates who are starving in practice. I recently saw a list of the forty schools in the country with the highest student loan default rate. Every chiropractic college was within that group. Some think the answer to that problem is to have less chiropractors. Others think it is to have more chiropractors. I think it is to have successful chiropractors, successful in the true sense of the word. Success based upon our efforts, not getting in on some government handout program and becoming just another special interest group. We need to be models to the rest of the profession. There is no greater model than a successful, happy, fulfilled chiropractor who gives every indication that he or she loves the “work,” every minute of every day. That will attract chiropractors to our movement. (It also doesn’t hurt us from an economic perspective to be successful). It is ironic that for years straight chiropractors focused on building large, successful practices and completely ignored the political and educational scene, so much so, that the mixers took control. We often conclude that was our greatest error. Now it seems to me that it is the other way around. The best thing we can do is build large, successful practices and ignore politics and education. We still need some straight input into those areas and there will always be people who enjoy those arenas. But for the majority of us straight chiropractors, being a lighthouse of pure, principled, straight chiropractic and a successful practitioner in the gloom and darkness that surrounds this profession is the greatest contribution one can make. We need to make the rest of the profession jealous about what we have, so much so, that they will flock to us and beg us to share it with them. That should be the primary goal of each straight chiropractor in the coming year.v12n2